arXiv Computation and Language

Read the Room, Read the Image: Understanding Indirect Speech Acts in Multimodal Visual Contexts

arXiv AI
Aug 26

EXAM$^2$: $\underline{Ex}tending$ $\underline{A}udio$ $Understanding$ $in$ $\underline{M}ultilingual$ $and$ $\underline{M}ultimodal$ $Analysis$

EXAM$^2$ is a new benchmark for audio understanding that covers six languages and multiple modalities—speech, sound, music, mixed-audio, and visual images—providing 5,667 multiple-choice questions, 22,614 image instances, and 135,684 multilingual translations. It evaluates large audio language models (LALMs) and multimodal large language models (LLMs), revealing significant gaps in multilingual and cross‑modal performance. The authors also introduce Gemma3n-EXAM$^2$, a lightweight fusion model that improves multilingual results by up to 12.4% and multimodal results by 21.7% over a strong baseline.

By Jiawen Wang, Xiaoxue Gao, Zi Haur Pang, Nancy F. Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Said Aloud, Read Different: Cross-Modal Instability in Multimodal Models

The paper introduces a new benchmark called Speech-Augmented Visually Grounded Contrastive Triplet Benchmark, comprising 10,150 images from 18 MENA countries, each paired with a supported statement and two plausible but unsupported alternatives. It defines contrastive instability as the rate at which multimodal models fail to resolve all statements within a triplet, distinguishing fragmented reasoning from complete failure. Experiments on recent multimodal models show that shifts in modality (text vs. speech) and language (English vs. Arabic) lead to significant triplet-level inconsistencies, especially when speech is used, which are not fully reflected by overall accuracy metrics.

By Basel Mousi, Fahim Dalvi, Shammur Chowdhury, Firoj Alam, Nadir Durrani
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Almieyar-Oryx-BloomBench: A Bilingual Multimodal Benchmark for Cognitively Informed Evaluation of Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 05531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the rapid progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), the field lacks benchmarks that rigorously diagnose their true reasoning abilities and chart meaningful progress toward human-like multimodal intelligence.

By Mohammad Mahdi Abootorabi, Omid Ghahroodi, Anas Madkoor, Marzia Nouri, Doratossadat Dastgheib, Mohamed Hefeeda, Ehsaneddin Asgari
arXiv AI
Jun 9

IMUG-Bench: Benchmarking Unified Multimodal Models on Interleaved Understanding and Generation

arXiv:2606. 09169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, unified multimodal models (UMMs) have emerged to support both understanding and generation within a single framework.

By Lingyi Meng, Zecong Tang, Haoran Li, Tengju Ru, Zhejun Cui, Weitong Lian, Qi Kang, Hangshuo Cao, Yichen Zhu, Yechi Liu, Kaixuan Wang, Yu-Jie Yuan, Chunwei Wang, Yu Zhang, Bo Dai
arXiv AI
3d ago

Imag-Eval: a language-grounded framework for interpretable Text-to-Image instruction following evaluation

Imag‑Eval is a new language‑grounded benchmark for evaluating Text‑to‑Image models, focusing on how well they follow compositional natural‑language instructions. It disentangles prompt length from compositional difficulty by independently varying the number of instances and the combination of constraints (rules), providing 1,140 prompts and 8,842 rule combinations. The study shows that for structured skills, the difficulty is mainly driven by the number of grounded rules and their binding to instances rather than prompt length alone.

By Ibrahim Mohamed Serouis, David Jaramillo Duque
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

CoVA-SFT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Chain of Visual Abstractions

CoVA‑SFT is a new large‑scale dataset comprising 51.9K samples and over 222K multimodal reasoning steps that teach models to interleave text and visual abstractions across five layout families and 17 complex tasks. It includes explicit rationale formulations, agentic renderings, and verification loops to help models build and maintain internal visual workspaces for purely textual reasoning problems. A companion benchmark, CoVA‑Bench, contains 1,700 held‑out test samples for reproducible evaluation, and models fine‑tuned on CoVA‑SFT outperform all interleaved CoT baselines by more than 2× on average, though they still lag behind strong text‑only CoT baselines.

By Tsung-Han Wu, Heekyung Lee, Anya Ji, Haoming Chen, Trevor Darrell, Joseph E. Gonzalez, David M. Chan